11/24/2013

Obama's lawless push back of the sign up date for Obamacare until after Nov election said to be "good news," hides insurance prices in other ways

Add another rewriting of the Obamacare law without going through congress, President Obama has delayed the sign up for Obamacare in 2015 from October 15th to November 15th this coming year. From a few weeks before the election to just after the election. Very clearly this is an attempt to push back the sticker shock people are going to feel from the higher premiums next year until after the election. This in addition to pushing back by a year the limit of out of pocket payments and the employer mandate. From Fox News:

An HHS official told Fox News the move will give insurers "the benefit of more time to evaluate their experiences during the 2014 plan year" and let them take into account late-filing customers when setting their 2015 rates.

The official added: "This change is good news for consumers, who will have more time to learn about plans before enrolling and an open enrollment period that's a week longer." . . .

George Will's comments on this delay being "too clever" are available here. This is only one of many things that the Obama administration is trying to hide. The whole point of the Obamacare marketplace was to allow comparisons between plans, but that ability to make comparisons is part of the website that isn't functioning. Some have argued that if people saw how high the premiums were to begin with they wouldn't go through the long process of signing up, but that since they only find that out at the end people will feel that they have already made that big investment in time so that they might as well still sign up. From NewsMax:

A key feature of the Obamacare website that would let people window-shop for plans and pricing data was one of the few functions that actually worked — yet administration officials told Congress it "failed miserably" before the Oct. 1 launch, CNN reported Friday.CNN reported that documents show the "Anonymous Shopper" function passed a key test almost two weeks before the HealthCare.gov launch, yet was turned off and is still unavailable to users. . . .House Republicans suspect the function was turned off to hide the sticker shock of insurance plans' costs and force Americans to jump through hoops before they could shop, CNN reported."Anonymous Shopper" was supposed to let people compare health insurance plans without opening an account, verifying their identity, or determining whether they qualified for a federal subsidy, CNN noted.Ironically, that's exactly the feature matching President Barack Obama's stated vision for the federal website: to operate just like retail sites that Americans browse and buy from every day, CNN reported. . . .

The notion that this one month delay is "good news for consumers" is pretty funny. It is surprising that the media seems to take this claim seriously. Take the way CNN discusses this. They barely give any serious coverage to the claim that there is a political motivation for the change, providing much, much more time to the White House view. From CNN:

Pushing back the start date, Carney said, will give insurers more time to get an idea of their new pool of customers before they set their 2015 rates.

Some critics, including Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said that the move was simply a political ploy and that any changes to health care plans, such as premium increases, for example, should be public before the election.

But Carney said the administration expects more people to sign up for health care insurance at the end of the current, initial open enrollment period -- which ends March 31, 2014 -- in part because of the website problems, so starting the next enrollment window later in the year would buy insurers more time to assess the situation. . . .